He had "queered" himself at the beginning in college. I had barely known him. He belonged to no fraternity, and except on the athletic field he kept out of all our genial life. And this life of ours, for all its thoughtlessness, was so rich in genuine friendships, so filled and bubbling over with the joy of being young, that we could not understand how any decent sort of chap could deliberately keep out of it. We put Joe Kramer down as a "grouch."
But now that I too was "queering" myself, our queerness drew us together, or rather, Joe's drew mine. In the ten years that have gone since then I have never met any man who drew me harder than he did, than he is drawing me even still—and this often in spite of my efforts to shake him off, and later of his quite evident wish to be rid of me. For Joe had what is so hard to find among us comfortable mortals, a sincerity so real and deep that it absolutely ruled his life, that it kept him exploring into things, kept him adventuring always.
In long tramps over the neighboring hills, on our backs in the grass staring up at the clouds, or in winter hugging a bonfire in the shelter of a boulder, or back in college over our beer or over countless pipes in our rooms, together we adventured through books and long hungry talks down into life—and of the paths we discovered I see even now no end.
Joe was tall and lean, with heavy shoulders stooping slightly. He was sallow, he never took care of himself. He ate his meals at all hours at a small cheap restaurant, where he bought a bunch of meal tickets each week. His face was obstinate, honest, kindly, his features were as blunt as his talk. He was the first to understand what I was so vaguely looking for, and to say, "All right, Kid, you come right along." And as he was farther along than I, he pulled me after him on the hunt after what he called "the genuine article" in this bewildering modern life.
His own life, to begin with, was a tie with this real modern world that had forced itself on me long ago through the harbor. For Joe had been "up against it" hard. Though blunt and frank about most things he talked little about himself, but I got his story bit by bit. "Graft" had come into it at the start. In a town of the Middle West his father had been a physician with a good practice, until when Joe was eleven years old a case of smallpox was discovered. Joe's father vaccinated about a score of children that week. The "dope" he used was mailed to him by a drug firm in Chicago. It was "rotten." Over half the children were desperately ill and seven of them died. Joe's father, his mother and both older sisters did duty as nurses day and night. After that they left town, moved from town to town, that story always following, and finally both parents died. Since then Joe had been a teamster, a clerk in a hardware store, a brakeman, a telegrapher, and last, the assistant editor of a paper in a small town. He had scraped and slaved and studied throughout with the idea of coming East to college. He had come at twenty-two, beating his way on freight trains. On the top of a car one night he had fallen asleep and been knocked on the head by a steel beam jutting down under a bridge. Then, after two weeks on a hospital bed, he had arrived at college.
Here he had earned a meager way by writing football and baseball news for a string of western papers. Here he had looked for an education, and here "a bunch of dead ones" had handed him "news from the graveyard" instead.
I can still see him in classroom, head cocked to one side, grimly watching the prof. And once during a Bible course lecture I heard his voice blandly ironic behind me:
"Will somebody ask Mister Charley Darwin to be so good as to step this way?"
"We've been cheated, Bill," he told me. "We've been cheated right along. Take history, for instance, the kind of stuff we were handed in school. I got onto it first when I was fourteen. It was a rainy Saturday and my mother told me to go and clean out an old closet up in the attic. Well, I found my German grandfather's diary there, written when he was in college in Leipsic, in 1848. The way those kids jumped into things! The way they got themselves mixed up in the Revolution of Forty Eight! To hear my young grandfather talk, that year was one of the biggest times in European history. Our school history gave it five pages and then druled on about courts and kings. 'I'll go to college,' I made up my mind. 'College will put me next to the truth.' So I saved my little nickels and came. But college," he added moodily, "ain't advanced as far as it was in my young grandfather's time."
"Do you know who's to blame for this stuff?" he said. "It's not the profs, I've nothing against them, all they need is to be kicked out. No, it's us, because we stand for their line of drule. If we got right up on our honkeys and howled, all of us, for a real education, we'd get it by next Saturday night. But we don't care a damn. Why don't we? Are we all of us dubs? No we're not. Go down to the football field and see. There's as much brains in figuring out those plays as there is in mathematics. Would we stand for coaches like our profs? But that's just it. It's the thing to be alive in athletics and a dub in everything else. And because it's the thing, every fellow fits in. On the whole," he added reflectively, "I think it's this 'dear old college' feeling that's to blame for it all."